The Charge

Don't buy this DVD. How's that for a tag line?

Opening Statement

Following in the legendary footsteps of stuntmen and martial artists like
Jackie Chan and Jet Li, elbowing their way into Hollywood by way of their
impressive back catalog in their homelands, Thailand's Tony Jaa is quickly
becoming the next "big thing" in martial art films. Ask anyone who has
seen Ong-Bak or The Protector, and they can attest to his physical
prowess. He's got serious skills.

But everyone starts somewhere. Go back far enough into Jet Li's career, and
you have films like Born to Defense, or Jackie Chan in Not Scared to
Die. These are terrible, terrible films. Fans that are unfortunate enough to
discover them suffer horribly in agony. Yes, they're that bad. In the spirit of
this terribleness, Mill Creek has released Spirited Killer: Trilogy, a
trifecta of unimaginable terribleness that has absolutely no redeeming qualities
of any kind for North American audiences.

Facts of the Case

In Spirited Killer, a group of travelers visiting the forests are
attacked by a sword-wielding maniac. The attacker is the Spirited Killer (Panna
Rittikrai), a forest spirit that protects his territory by beating people up. It
proves a very effective deterrent.

In Spirited Killer 2: Awakened Zombie Battles, two sisters are in
search of their grandfather's body so it can be buried in their family tomb. In
the jungle, they run afoul of gangsters performing an evil experiment involving
blood that turns them into zombies. A Sword of God may be involved, a bunch of
exorcists and zombie attacks are also involved. Also, the zombies know martial
arts.

In Spirit Killer 3: Ghost Wars, two expedition parties form China and
Japan converge in the forest looking for a sacred black stone. The locals, upset
at the intrusion, call upon the Spirited Killer to stop them, but when he
arrives, he comes with zombies, ghosts and ninjas to fight the invaders. No,
seriously.

The Evidence

In the late eighties, an influential stunt team called Muay Thai Stunt formed
and began to offer their talents to low-budget filmmakers in Thailand, even
getting involved in creating films exclusively around showcasing their talents.
These indie films, of which dozens and dozens were pumped out in rapid
succession, highlighted the talents of filmmaker/choreographer/actor Panna
Rittikrai, an influential and popular performer who lead the troop to great
success in their native lands. However, interest in the genre peaked in the
mid-nineties, and the team discontinued film production. A few years later,
Rittikrai re-formed the group and revived the genre with his hand-picked
protégé, Tony Jaa and a brand new production. The film was
Ong-Bak, and the rest is history.

Trying desperately to capitalize on Jaa's new popularity, Spirited
Killer: Trilogy catalogs three examples of these early films into one DVD
package. His name is all over the packaging, and his face is all over the
packaging, so one makes the reasonable assumption that Tony Jaa actually appears
in all three films included...right? Oh, so wrong. Jaa has one decent scene in
the first film, Spirited Killer, and that's it. He shows up a grand total
of once, has one fight scene (admitted a good one) and that's it. The other two
movies, I have no idea if Jaa is even in them. If he is, he is an unnamed cast
member at best. It is true that Jaa was a member of the Muay Thai Stunt team
during this period, but he was just a kid -- one of dozens of men and women
looking for their big break.

If you are unfamiliar with this late 90s style of independent Thai cinema,
it's...well...it's an experience. Bodily function comedy get randomly mixed with
martial art sequences, singing and dancing numbers erupt spontaneously at
seemingly the most ill-timed moments in terms of narration, and plots are simply
lifted and reorganized from Bollywood and Hong Kong films from twenty years
earlier. You could call them an "acquired taste," but I don't actually
know anyone who wants to acquire them. I'm sure the Thai love them, but from a
North American perspective, they are terrible. Spirited Killer is the
best film of the bunch, and that's not saying much; a low-budget, ratty, grainy
and poorly created forest romp full of fight sequences and zero plot. The action
is pretty stiff by modern standards, save for the fight with Jaa, where one can
believe (if only for a moment) that things will get better. They do not. The two
sequels are so obscure they're not even listed on IMDb. I pray that they don't
really exist, and are mere figments of my imagination.

Awakened Zombie Battles (admittedly a great name) and Ghost
Wars are horrendous products, and hardly any information exists about them
on the Internet in English. Ramping up the comedic elements to an almost
slapstick level, they are impossibly frenetic and confusing, and I confess to
having no idea what the hell is going on in any of them. A bunch of people go
into the forest and the Spirit Killer (whoever that is) shows up and beats them
all up. Rinse and repeat. The action sequences marginally improve as time
progresses, but the comedic elements rob them of their grit and impact,
replacing it with cheap laughs and urination gags. Honestly, Awakened Zombie
Battles, I have no idea how it even fits into this "series."

As for Ghost Wars, it's the silliest of the bunch. I love how the
film crew decided the easiest way for people to tell who was supposed to be
Chinese and who was supposed to be Japanese (out of the all-Thai crew) was to
give bronze makeup to the "Japanese" actors. Problem solved! After
all, it worked perfectly in Dr. No. Oh, and if you have black eye shadow
on? That means you're a ghost. Just, you know, putting that out there, in case
anyone was wondering.

Even for those who truly love this kind of "so bad it's good"
drive-in cinema, these are tough films to appreciate. The stunt choreography and
fight sequences certainly have potential, and you can see how the talented cast
and crew went on to achieve success in bigger, more elaborate productions, but
these are rough and wretched examples of early, unpolished work. Oh, and did we
mention this isn't really a "trilogy"? Spirited Killer is
actually the fourth installment in the franchise. Confused yet? Yeah, well, join
the club.

We see a lot of bad presentations here at DVD Verdict, but this ranks down
there with some of the sloppiest. From the transfer to the audio to the
packaging itself, this is as bad as it gets. Take for example how the packaging
proclaims the film language track as "Taiwanese with English Dub."
This is an astonishing statement, considering Taiwanese isn't a real language.
Taiwan is the common name for the Republic of China, which is a democratic state
in East Asia, and Taiwanese might refer to denizens of this region, but it isn't
a language.

How do you make that kind of mistake on a retail product? The spoken
language in all three films is Thai. How do you mistake Thai for Taiwanese? Is
it possible that someone tried to type "Thaiwanese" on the DVD
packaging, and a spell checker (being unable to interpret deliberate racism or
cultural ignorance) just substituted accordingly? I've spent three days thinking
about it, and for the love of all that is holy, no other explanation makes
sense.

All three films look terrible, subjected to low-budget recording and poor
preservation, and are laden with scratches, tears, print damage, white and black
specs, you name it. Ghost Wars is from 1998, but I've seen Shaw Brothers
films twenty years older with less print damage. In addition to the horrible
source material quality, some of the films have aspect ratio issues. I have no
idea what Awakened Zombie Battgles original aspect ratio is supposed to
be, but the one it is presented in is absolutely wrong. Everyone looks scrunched
and impossibly elongated. And if you think you can cram three feature-length
films onto a single DVD without some horrible compression artifacts, then you
should go work for Mill Creek. What a mess!

Audio, in many ways, is worse. From the sounds of it, the film crews used
strings and empty cans to record their films. A constant string of corny
overdubs in the studio only make things feel absurd and unnatural. Tinny and
crackling, the audio is wretched. There is no bass response of any kind, and
unnatural thinness and treble in the dialogue. For no apparent reason,
Spirited Killer is dubbed into English -- a real drive-in grindhouse
quality recording, this one, with horrible puns, bad acting and dreadful
readings from all cast. In perhaps the most hilarious technical gaffe,
Spirited Killer mercifully offers up the original Thai language track in
addition to the dub, but fails to provide English (or any) subtitles for
audiences to actually use it. It's just there for no reason. Just when you think
it couldn't get any worse...

As for extras, forget it; there are none, unless you count the
"surprise" Thaiwanese track for Spirited Killer.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

Forget Jaa and the flagrantly false advertisement on this DVD. The real star
of the set is Rittikrai, the magic behind the scenes, serving as mentor, writer,
director, actor, choreographer and other assorted roles. Jaa may get all the
credit today, but Rittikrai laid the ground work. These three films are cheap,
shot on microscopic budgets with bad equipment, but they opened the doors for
more successful production work.

In a 2004 interview, Panna Rittikrai told the Bangkok Post, "My
loyalest fans are folk people in the far-out [subdivisions] where they lay out
mattresses on the ground and drink moonshine whisky while watching my outdoor
movies." You have to admire the guy for knowing his audience, and making
films for their tastes. I said earlier that most Thai films were
incomprehensible for North American audiences, but I hadn't taken into account
the moonshine. Maybe Panna's onto something.

Closing Statement

I lost count of the things wrong with Mill Creek's presentation of the
Spirited Killer trilogy. This is catastrophe at the highest level. If
Tony Jaa was dead, he would be spinning in his grave, performing elaborate
martial art routines. These might be "classics" in the strictest sense
of Thai genre cinema, but even still, this release would qualify as one of the
lousiest DVD presentations on record.

The Verdict

Taiwanese with English Dub? Seriously? I can't get over that one. It slays
me.